Spirograph Drawing Machine
A Spirograph is a geometric drawing machine that produces roulette curves. A roulette is the curve described by a point (called the generator or pole) attached to a given curve as that curve rolls without slipping, along a second given curve that is fixed.
To understand the mathematics behind the generation of these drawing,THIS gives a details explanation about the maths behing generating these curves.
The drawing generated out of these drawing machine look like these examples Here
For our machine making assignment, As we researched on various drawing machines, we understood about the Spirograph that came about in the 19th century and then evolved to a harmonograph which adopts pendulums to create geometric patterns and had more flexibility on terms of points of control to make the drawings. We came across this website , Cycloid Drawing machine where he designed a cyloid drawing machine to construct Spirograph drawing but with more flexible options for changing the parameters for the drawing without constructing a harmonograph.
Drawing inspiration from this machine, we decided to use the parameters of different size gears, different rails/slots for the gears to sit on, and slots on the gears itself to give us the option of generating various geometric patterns.
For the purpose of our concept, we simplified the rails all along the board at different axes to 3 simple rails which can be rotated along one point to generate three options from one center along which the rail rotates.
Here is a list of the many projects online that picked our interest to adopt a few concepts from:
For the purpose of generating gears, we found some really nice online gear generators:
And from here, we go on to design our machine.